Saturday, February 19, 2011

All right, ever since I became side-tracked on what I consider to be the major threat currently facing humanity - the sickening overuse of the word "artisan" and its derivatives - everyone else has been noticing it too. Recently it's even been prominently featured in a nationwide TV ad to describe mass-produced ravioli, of all freakin' things.

Anyway, since it's too late for me to go back and pretend I never started this, here are some of the more irritating examples of the problem that have been sent in:

From Shannon, who says this was at Starbucks (assumedly not made by kosher artisans). This one gets bonus irritation points for also having the word "handcrafted" in it:

The bigbadblog, Serious Eats, is right there with you. In its top 10 restaurant picks, number 3 is:

3. Less "artisan" this and "artisan" that.

There was a time when the word artisan actually meant something—it was produced by an artist. These days, anything handmade or rustic in appearance gets the artisan stamp. Let your food's flavor speak for itself. If it's truly made by an "artist," your customers should be able to taste it.

I suggest more candor in advertising. If a worker changes the settings by hand on food production machinery, then the ad claim should be limited to "artisinally adjusted".

I toured Howes Cavern in New York. The tour gathered just inside the entrance. I saw a stack of wrapped boxes about 6 x 8 x 4 feet. The guide explained that the Cavern rented out this small space to a cheese company, and this was a stack of their cheese. The cheese would later be sold as "cave aged".

It's kind of like the first act of one of those horror movies where everyone in the world suddenly starts saying the same nonsense word over and over as a prelude to becoming possessed and killing each other. But I'm artisan sure that's not artisan what's artisan happening here artisan artisan artisan artisan artisan artisan artisan artisan artisan artisan artisan artisan artisan artisan artisan artisan artisan artisan

I went to see my neurologist. Being a dog person, she requires that I bring a dog with me to appointments. While discussing my health or lack thereof, she feeds the dog cheese from the office fridge. This time, she said, it was artisanal cheese--an imported Appenzeller. Even the neurologists are being subverted by the Artisan Agenda.

I thought of this blog post when I was reading the label of some yarn I recently bought. There is a description of how it is handmade. Toward the end of the paragraph it says, "...creating a new generaton of skilled artisans..."

Welcome to my whining!

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